From its title, you’d immediately expect Women Without Men to be a feminist tract, and that’s what you get — sort of. Set amidst the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s, it tells the story of four women, each oppressed by men in some way, and how they [...]

There are a few directors whose films I can never say no to. More Jarmusch? Yes please. More Herzog? You bet. More Kubrick? Is there even a question? Abbas Kiarostami clearly belongs to this pantheon. Trust Kiarostami to come up with something completely new and radically profound. In what may be his greatest work to date, Homework (1989), he pulls off something that world directors have been struggling to even script. But more than the content, what baffles us about all his films, more so in Homework…

Unquestionably, Kiarostami’s films are unlike any film ever seen, leave alone Iranian ones. But one film that is extreme and decidedly avant-garde even by Kiarostami’s standards – Five: Five long takes dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2003) – has turned out to be one of his finest works. Kiarostami quietly integrates the five elements of nature to create a film that is as warm as Ozu’s and as puzzling as his own, in a way, forming a singular connection between them. And that is why “Five” stands as a fitting tribute to one of cinema’s greatest humanists, by another…

What other arts have been doing for decades – reflecting on the medium themselves rather than the content they carry – cinema has started picking up. Not many films have sought to break off from the narrative seriousness to come out and ponder on the nature of cinema itself. The names of Godard and Kiarostami clearly stand out in this context. But one quiet little film that Jafar Panahi made between the widely celebrated The White Balloon and The Circle could easily have made the former filmmakers proud.

“The reason women don’t play football is because eleven of them would never wear the same outfit in public”, goes a famous quote about football and women. Jafar Panahi’s football based flick Offside is about six women who surely don’t have the luxury of that… it shows an Islam dominated country where women need to conceal their femininity in entirety, to merely catch a glimpse of a sport they so fervently admire – let alone indulge in such finicky femininities. Here, six Tehrani women sloppily slip into the loose, unfitting clothes of men…

Abbas Kiarostami’s claustrophobic documentation of a day in the life of a woman in Iran. who is on the verge of a divorce. and the people she meets during her long ride in the city. Kiarostami’s quarter century long innovation continues as Ten scores. There are not more than a handful of directors who have the special ability to look beyond the boundaries and hop over the conventions of the medium. Abbas Kiarostami, with his radically fresh perspective and consistent streak of “different” films…

There is an actor in each of us that is always raring to come out. And it is that actor Mohsen Makhmalbaf wanted to capture in his camera and present to the world. He shoots two birds with one stone in this one – provide a stunning salute to the spirit of cinema on its centennial anniversary, and gives the very audience who adore cinema a shot at stardom. Makhmalbaf’s documentary, not without flaws, is definitely one to pay a salam (salute) to – a salute to the spirit of people, and to the spirit of cinema.

For a large part of the world Majid Majidi’s filmography begins with the disarmingly charming Children of Heaven (1997). But the Iranian auteur had already struck gold a year before the first Oscar nomination from Iran. The themes, style and idiosyncrasies that were to mesmerize the world in the years following Children of Heaven clearly [...]

If big things often come in small packages, then “the children of heaven” is as small as they get. The entire movie is carried on the shoulders of two small, diminutive revelations for the Iranian cinema – Amir Farrokh Hashemian as Ali and Bahare Seddiqi as Zahra.
Ali, a young boy of about nine, unintentionally loses [...]

There are few moments in one’s passage on earth that decide the course of meandering river we call life. And then there are those even rarer ones that define the existence of one person – those that shape his/her passion, and ignite a fire in the form of an obsession that cannot be extinguished. For [...]